Slashdot Mirror
Next-Gen X Window Rendering For Linux
Bytal writes "Seth Nickel, a GNOME hacker, has an extensive treatment of the next generation Linux graphics technologies being worked on by Red Hat and others. For all those complaining about the current X-Windows/X.org server capabilities, things like 'Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them,' 'Workspace switching effects so lavish they make Keynote jealous' and even the mundane 'Hardware accelerated PDF viewers' may be interesting."
Actually reading through it now, it looks like they are going for a combination of OSX and XP. Still got to ask, are they beating a dead horse, when OSX does Xwindows too?
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I submitted this story to Slashdot last week, but for some reason it seems to be stuck in "Pending" status, so go here: http://nat.org/2005/february/#9-February-2005
It's an OpenGL-based X11 server, complete with some screenshots. Apparently, window dragging is very smooth (no repaint events are even given to the apps), and with Cairo and GTK, this really could be the future backend for Linux desktops.
overall the idea is good, however...
1) rendering to texture is slow on some GPUs, especially GPUs with limited memory.
2) alpha blending is expensive on almost all GPUs.
imo X needs an overhaul, needs to ditch the legacy crap (lose Xaw for example) and move on. stop interfacing with video hardware like it's 1980.
A few things that sound useful, like:
- Hardware accelerated PDF viewers
- Synchronized smooth resizing so there's no disjunct between window borders moving and the contents redrawing (you should see the demos of this in luminocity... it really makes a difference in how real the interface feels, just as double-buffering did for stuff moving)
- A shared path between on-screen display and printing (using Cairo's PDF/PS backends)
- Alpha transparency in applications whenever and wherever the urge strikes us
A couple things that may lead to greater usability:- Toolkit themes that draw with layer blending effects, delightful bezier curves, and irritating alpha gradients
- Live window thumbnails
And lots of rather pointless fancy eye candy:- Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them
- Hundreds of spinning soft snowflakes floating over your screen.... without messing up nautilus
- A photograph of a field of long dry savanna grass as your desktop background... where the grass is gently swooshed around by a breeze created by moving your mouse across the background
- Windows that shrink scale and move all over the fucking place with cool animations
- Vector icons with very occasional super subtle animations rendered in realtime...a tiny fly which buzzes around the trash every several minutes, etc... think mood animations as in Riven (which as a total random aside is still a shockingly beautiful and atmospheric game years after it came out, postage stamp sized multimedia videos notwithstanding)
- Workspace switching effects so lavish they make Keynote jealous
- Brush stroke / Sumi-e, tiger striped, and other dynamically rendered themes where every button, every line looks a little different (need to post shots / explanation of this stuff, but another day)
- Progress bars made with tendrils of curves that smoothly twist and squirm like a bucket of snakes as the bar grows
- Text transformed and twisted beyond recognition in a manner both unseemly and cruel
- A 10% opaque giant floating head of tigert overlayed above all the windows and the desktop.
Now, these fancy effects are certainly kind of cool, and may look nice. (Though I can guarantee that when they're all in, I'll probably still be using Blackbox.) However, is that really all that the future holds? More special effects, without any substantial improvements in usability?How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Um, if it's hardware accelerated, it will be eating fewer of your CPU cycles
Not necessarily so. Well, only if they use hardware acceleration to do existing tasks that are already being done solely by software acceleration. I mean, how many resources does xpdf et al use really?
However, if they are introducing new eye candy wizz-bang GUI magic, chances are that the hardware requirements (including CPU and RAM) will be much higher anyways - even with suitable h/w- accel compatible hardware. And for course those without the h/w-accel compatible hardware, this would eat up even more CPU cycles for the rendering. I repeat, how many resources does xpdf et al use really?
No, the sort of things Seth is talking about is not what E is about. Maybe in the superficial stuff like pagers and advanced theme management, but Seth is speaking of a whole new framework.
Enlightenment is sort of hard to categorize. I believe they refer to the whole suite as a "Desktop Shell". That is, they offer more than a Window Manager (a suite of high-powered libraries, a launcher/panel, desktop effects, file browser, etc.) but less than Gnome or KDE in terms of a desktop environment (which include full cross-platform toolkits, application interoperability, central configuration, random daemons, etc.) The goal of E17 seems to be creating an amazing user desktop experience, but the goals of the next-gen rendering are mainly a superset.
What Seth is talking about is the fundamental application stack for rendering windows and widgets on the screen. Right now, the printing usability situation is really bad. This is one area where I think Windows really gets it right. Adding a printer is quite easy, and your document always looks like what those "print preview" pages allege it will. Currently, there's little guarantee that the printed output of your document will match what you expect it to be, because there's two different rendering pipelines for screen versus page. This is what Seth is talking about. Unless they want to get even more ambitious, the Enlightenment project has nothing to do with printing.
By itself, E17 may be able to give your windows shadows or fake transparency, but a full compositing manager + hardware accelerated backend will allow true alpha blending, fast updates and fun live animations like OSX's genie. Note that this extensions can be easily used by E17 as well, but are really impossible without them.
Finally, the toolkit integration is probably the most exciting. I know E17 is sporting a basic toolkit library itself, but that's probably because they want tight integration between native E17 apps and the WM. I personally think this is the wrong move, because they're probbaly not going to be able to create a fully-featured and cross-platform toolkit like GTK+. (Hence, not many application developers are going to use EWL.) A GTK (and eventually, QT4) application will be able to rely on a sophisticated drawing level (Cairo, instead of Xlib), which will allow all of its applications to be rendered nicely, allowing blending and more free-formed widgets. gDesklets and the like are just the beginning.
http://www.talknerdy.org